79-04-B5

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Nuclear Power I

Transcript It takes 12 years to get a nuclear power plant built in America. It only takes four or five in most other countries. The seven or eight years difference is not construction time in our country; it is paperwork and the multitudinous permits required by government. Those permits are largely the result of placard carrying demonstrators. I'd like to mention a few things you won't read on one of those placards. To begin with, the first nuclear power plant began generating electricity in Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957. Today there are 72 such plants in the U.S. and 151 in other countries. In our country they provide about 12 percent of our electricity. The placard bearers base most, if not all, of their protests on safety. Well, first of all, there is nothing you can do to make the nuclear fuel in a power plant blow up like a bomb. Second, in normal operation a nuclear power plant emits less radioactivity than a coal burning plant. Coal contains a small amount of uranium which goes out the stack with the smoke and soot. Ah! But what about an accident to a truck carrying radioactive material? Well, what about it? Highly radioactive materials are transported in special casks that cost $2 million apiece. They have been tested by crashing them into solid walls at 80 miles an hour and by hitting them with speeding locomotives. They didn't break and even if they had, the radioactive material is imbedded in ceramics. In 1973 the Atomic Energy Commission organized an elaborate $4 million study headed by Professor Norman Rasmussen of M.I.T. Two years later the findings were complete. The worst accident that could possibly happen would be a meltdown of nuclear fuel, a breaking of the protective shield (which incidentally can withstand a direct hit by a bomb) and in atmospheric conditions, which would keep the released radioactive dust in a cloud near the ground and blowing toward a densely populated area. The odds on all that happening are once in a billion reactor years. If the U.S. were getting all its electricity from nuclear power that would be once in three million years. A group calling itself the Union of Concerned Scientists presently advising Ralph Nader, has gotten attention by charging the Rasmussen report is wrong by a factor or 100. Well, if they are right, then a worst case might happen once in 30,000 years. Let's analyze these two estimates and see what they mean. Rasmussen's report would mean a loss of 30 minutes in our average life expectancy. This is equal to the risk of smoking one cigarette every 20 years. If Nader's group is right, our life expectancy would be shortened by two days. That is the equivalent of smoking one cigarette every three months. Critics of nuclear power raise the issue of waste disposal. A coal burning plant produces waste billions of times greater in bulk than a nuclear plant. The waste from one nuclear plant in a year would take less storage space than a dining room table. That hardly seems to be an insurmountable problem and certainly no reason for denying ourselves this economical, inexhaustible source of electric power. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 79-04-B5 Production Date 6-Mar1979 Book/Page N/A Audio Youtube? No
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